Abroad at Home; The Politics of Nativism

When California political consultants talk with their focus groups these days about such issues as crime, schools or jobs, they find an underlying concern about something else: immigration. There is a strain of ferocious anti-immigrant feeling in the state.

Fear of immigrants is not new in California. As long ago as 1848 an outcry against Peruvian miners led to a Foreign Miners Tax, and there has been periodic anti-immigrant fever since.

The present agitation focuses on illegal immigration. Of California's population of 31 million, about 1 million are estimated to be undocumented aliens, most of them from Mexico and other Latin American countries. But the hostility really seems to extend to all immigrants, legally admitted or not.

The anti-immigrant mood is plainly connected to California's current economic distress. It is said that immigrants take jobs away from citizens and put a costly burden on schools, hospitals and other public facilities.

In fact, most economists believe that immigrants benefit, not burden, the economy. Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, writing in The Wall Street Journal last year, showed that immigrants do not reduce others' jobs and that the average immigrant family pays $2,500 more in taxes annually than it receives in public services. (But most of the tax money goes to the Federal Government rather than the localities that pay for such things as schools.)

"Some people genuinely worry about the problem of too many immigrants in a stagnant economy," Prof. Bill O. Hing, an immigration expert at the Stanford Law School, says. "But for most, economics is a diversion. Underneath it is race."

People say that immigrants are clannish, live by themselves, don't speak English. All of those things were said 100 years ago about Jews and Italians and others whom nativists denounced as "undesirable immigrants." Much of what is going on in California today is old-fashioned nativism or xenophobia.

A frequent claim, for example, is that today's immigrants do not assimilate as readily as those in the past. But English-language courses have long waiting lists.

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The historic American pattern of striving immigrants building the economy also continues. Here in San Jose, the big city of Silicon Valley, Vietnamese are about 10 percent of the population. Vietnamese businesses are thriving, and many a high school valedictorian is of Vietnamese origin.

But facts are being overwhelmed by the emotions of fear and hatred. And politicians are running with those feelings much the same way they used to with anti-Communism.

Gov. Pete Wilson has staked out the low ground on the issue. Last summer he published an open letter to President Clinton demanding sweeping measures against illegal immigrants.

Mr. Wilson called for a constitutional amendment to repeal the 14th Amendment's provision that everyone born in the United States is a citizen. American-born children of illegal immigrants should not be citizens, he said -- and should be denied the right to attend public schools.

The Supreme Court held in 1982 that denying education to illegal aliens was unconstitutional. Even the dissenters, in an opinion by then Chief Justice Warren Burger, said that as a matter of social policy it would be "senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children . . . of an elementary education."

The Governor sought advice from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration group, which urged him to seek exclusion of undocumented aliens from public hospitals and schools. FAIR gets support from a New York foundation, the Pioneer Fund, that also subsidizes researchers seeking to prove that blacks and Latinos are inherently inferior.

Democratic politicians have tried to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have proposed fierce new measures to tighten the border. But one political observer, paraphrasing the saying about a segregationist Senator in the old South, said: "Nobody's going to out-immigrate Pete Wilson."

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 14, 1994, on Page A00029 of the National edition with the headline: Abroad at Home; The Politics of Nativism. Today's Paper|Subscribe